Rating:  - A useful book
Many software books present a padded version of the homesite reference manual, perhaps larded with computer-science boilerplate, industry war stories, and the software-manual version of standup comedy.
Not so this. Hibernate is a popular Object/Relational Mapping tool, aimed at rationalizing the interaction of databases and application programs. "Professional Hibernate" offers an excellent introduction to the topic, featuring plenty of diagrams and short, pertinent code samples. The pace is right, and the book makes me believe that the authors have actually used Hibernate for application development.
Extensive treatment is given to the relationship of Hibernate to other major Open-Source tools, notably Xdoclet, Maven and Eclipse ( there are lots of others). Owing to the enormous flux in this area, the chapter on Eclipse has gotten a bit out of date in the year since it was written, as Hibernate Synchronizer is apparently winning out over Hibernator in the marketplace of downloads.
It is interesting to compare this book to "Hibernate -- A Developer's Notebook" by James Elliott. Both books are well organized, well written, and stick to the point. Elliott's book is smaller and costs half as much. Pugh and Gradecki offer a bit more on the interaction of Hibernate to other packages.
To inject a personal opinion, I'm not comfortable with the Object/Relational Model. The gist of it seems to be: the database is a place for objects to rest when idle. My own experience suggests otherwise: the natural relationship between classes and tables is complicated, and admits no bijection the two. While HQL supports joins, it seems that Hibernate is principally geared for single-table queries, which are too simple to support nontrivial business logic. So, while Hibernate is generally thought to save work in JDBC applications, I doubt ORM hits the mark.
Rating:  - Absolutely Disappointing
This book has some of the good qualities of a typical Wrox title: code centered, clear layout, step-by-step practical approach, but has clearly been published without even the shadow of a technical review. My guss is the book was rushed and not really invested into because "the hibernate book" (by Gavin King) was looming on the horizon. The publisher would have shown much more business sense if it had taken time for a really solid book on Hibernate 3. The amount of typos and inaccuracies both in the text and in the code is staggering. Several interesting subjects are mentioned, like AspectJ and Design Patterns, but in a too superficial way to be of any real help. Gradecki, I hope you have not really co-authored this but just supplied the AspectJ chapter...
Rating:  - Laughably bad
Full of typos (they could at least have done a search-and-replace of "Hibemate"). Lots of filler (viz. the chapters on things like the DAO pattern).
Definitely not worth it.
The Manning book remains the standard for in-depth coverage, while the O'Reilly programmer's notebook does the trick for the quick-and-dirty introduction. Skip the rest.
Rating: - Don't Waste your $ on This One
Author: Eric Pugh, Joseph Gradecki
Professional Hibernate
By Eric Pugh and Joseph Gradecki
Wrox, Wiley Pub. Co. ISBN0764576771
Reviewed by Jim Lauria-HuNTUG member
"Hibernate is an object/relational mapping tool for a Java environment."
An easy to read book (the good point) filled with poorly written code, typos and mistake laden text. As others have said most of the code in this book would NOT compile and seems to have not even been tested.
Save yourself $39.99-less online-and save yourself aggrevation as well.
I would give it no stars if that option was available
Rating: - Unprofessional Hibernate
I'd actually give this book 0 stars if I could.
I have never purchased such a bad technical book in 16 years of spending my money on these things. This book is full of coding errors, explanation errors, and typographical errors. The authors fail to point out very important information needed to get their examples working. The downloadable examples are organized in folders for the wrong chapters. The examples don't work when applied to configurations described in the text. The litany of problems goes on and on.
The fact the book mentions no technical reviewers should have tipped me off.
The supporting Web page at Wrox has no errata entries, even though the book has hundreds of mistakes. The forum on the book is dead. If you want to post errata you have to register, and then when you do it rejects your login. Perhaps that accounts for no errata.
I'd say the authors have no interest in maintaining such a list themselves, or else have moved on to other hobbies. As a Java developer I'd strongly recommend anyone contemplating this book moves on and buys another book instead. I'd recommend the book by Will Iverson ("Hibernate : A J2EE Developer's Guide") or "Hibernate in Action" by Christian Bauer, Gavin King instead.
The only positive thing I could say for the book is that it will force you do a lot of hunting down of answers to help you get through all the problems that working through their examples will give you. Having to fix a problem is often the best way to understand the details of a tool, API, or issue. But as a way of learning a technology I'd not recommend it. Most developers have enough of such frustrations in their day to day job to deal with already.
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